


The drowned man

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [9]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence discussion, Character Study, Literary References & Allusions, Mental Instability, Mid-Movie Spoilers, PSTD, Psychological Drama, Racist Language, Science fiction in the fairy tale, for resilient readers, will Duane's meatloaf be deployed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 01:56:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13261179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: Hoffstetler wants to enjoy a little science fiction over his lunch break at Occam. Instead, thanks to the book in his hand, he learns what’s lurking in Strickland’s inner swamps. Guest appearance by J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novella,The Drowned World.





	The drowned man

In Occam’s management cafeteria, he took his tray and held out his ID card. “Thank you, Dr. Hoffstetler,” the server said.

He gave them an absent nod and went to have his past-midnight lunch. This night was terrible. Both of his masters – those who ordered him as an American scientist and as a Russian spy – were equally determined to destroy an amazing creature. He needed a small break to keep up his strength. An empty table by a window looked like refuge. He took it.

He slipped a book out of his lab coat pocket, removed its bookmark, and placed a gentle thumb on his page. With his free hand, he lifted his fork, gave his tray’s resilient meatloaf one poke. Perhaps in a moment. To begin, he ate tater tots with one hand while cradling the book in the other. He read.

The book’s compelling story, based on science, was fiction. The story swept him away to a future world where the climate had changed, the land had flooded. It seemed terribly probable. Perhaps, he thought, the creature, the amphibian man, might flourish in such a future. Might he be not the last of his kind, but the _first_?

The chair opposite him dragged out, a rattling _screeee_. A yard-long apparatus clattered on the table.  He kept his head down, trying not to wince. He knew who was rude enough to join him without asking. Strickland, that ugliest American: self-absorbed, short-sighted, sadistic. His tray held three cups of water and a wrapped snack cake. “Bob. I’m having a _good_ night, Bob. Things are moving forward.”

Bob sighed, submitting to the despised nickname. He watched as Strickland extracted a medicine bottle. Clumsily, with one hand, the injured man rattled out two pain pills, then a third. Humanity led Bob to ask, “Do you need some help?”

“Never.” Strickland downed the pills and a cup of water in one gulp. Then, he saw the cover of Bob’s book, a vivid green jungle framing a solitary man. He went still as a predator. “What’s that?” He plucked it from Bob’s nerveless hand. Strickland read its title, _The Drowned World._ He flipped it open at random, losing Bob’s place, and began to read aloud, flat and mocking.

_The further down the Central Nervous System you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae...is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now…_

Strickland paused. His hard tone had shifted after the first sentence. He spun the book back to its cover and tapped the author’s name. “Who’s this J.G. Ballard and why isn’t _he_ on this project?”

“He is British.”

Strickland’s mouth twisted. He gave the book another random flip to read more.

_That wasn’t a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons._

As Strickland read, his eyes opened wide, like a boy seeing new worlds. Had Bob misjudged him? Another page caught Strickland’s attention. His face alight, he began another, hideously apt, passage.

_Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished._

Bob tried clearing his throat. “If I may explain — it is experimental — ”

Strickland smacked the book face down on the table, breaking its spine. “You scientists. You write it down, debate it. Me, I know this.”

The hair rose on the back of Bob's neck. “But — ”

“Those swamps? Lagoons? I. Have. Been. There.” Strickland's pain pills had settled in, pairing with the book to unmoor some inhibition in the man. His voice was sleepy, hypnotic. “Eleven years ago, Bob. Fucking Korea. Fighting in the Pusan rice paddies. It’s hard to shoot a gook in the rain, Bob. But roll in mud and blood, slide up behind, get his head in the water? He’s dead in half a minute. Get a knife in them? The same. Hunting those swamps made me the man to get the Asset down in Brazil.” He flung his second cup of water down his throat.

Bob found himself frozen. Strickland leaned forwards, his pupils unnerving pinpricks. “I went down, all right. Brazil was filth. Leeches, savages, black lagoons. There is no drowning the Asset, Bob. That filth’s its home. You wouldn’t have it if I hadn’t gone down in that filth, too. I’m the one who dragged it out. Who taught it fear.”  

He drew his cattle prod close. “Millions of years…six thousand…doesn’t matter. Now that we’re here, this world is ours. It’s up to us to claim what we’ve been given.”

Strickland nudged the broken book back to Bob with the prod. “I’m glad to see this thinking. Backs up what I’ve said about the Asset. You scientists, you’ll get to see if it’s true tomorrow. When you do your autopsy.” Strickland reeled up. He scooped his snack cake into his injured hand and stalked away. The force of him shoving the chair back slopped his last cup of water from his abandoned tray.

Bob lifted his book away from the spill and checked the back. For all its piercing language, the ideas that built its story, it was supposed to be fiction.

Supposed to be.

Bob sat there like he was mired in one of the book’s tropical swamps. He had scrutinized Strickland’s dossier, clean type listing battles, missions, medals. The true mud and blood of Strickland stained Bob with mortal fear. He had been warned of such threats as an embedded agent. Now, here they were.

Yet Strickland’s dark depths had also opened him to the writer’s strange visions. It might not be too late, to bring Strickland, and his influence, around…and spare the creature. 

He ought to find out.

The meatloaf, and one tater tot, were left on Bob’s tray. He sat there, waiting for his appetite to return. When it did not, he took both his tray and Strickland’s. He placed them where they belonged, on a moving belt. Its unseen machinery fed both trays to sterile darkness.  

Bob watched them go. Then, he took the stairs that would lead him, too, downwards and to Strickland.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Who’s this J.G. Ballard_ \- A fantastic science fiction writer from the 60s until his recent death whose work has held up amazingly well. The three extensive quotes are all from J.G. Ballard’s short, powerful science fiction novel, _The Drowned World._ Published in 1962, it was considered radical at the time. It inverts the science fiction status quo around hero and villain, sanity and madness. It’s remembered as prescient today for its global-warming theme. 
> 
> [A very good review and the original 1962 cover are here.](http://galacticjourney.org/july-4-1962-happy-submersion-the-drowned-world-by-j-g-ballard/)


End file.
